Chapter 1 - The Eye Under the Pencil
The first thing Ethan recognized was the eye.
Not the whole face.
Claire lunged before he could uncover that much.
“DON’T!”
Ethan twisted the notebook out of her reach and pulled Lily tighter against his chest.
The little girl was still shaking. Her face remained pressed into the lapel of his navy suit, but one hand clutched the front of his shirt as if letting go would make him disappear.
Claire stopped behind the overturned chair.
For several seconds nobody spoke.
Ethan looked again at Lily’s drawing.
Claire had been drawn in burgundy crayon on the left.
Beside her stood a tall man.
Lily had colored over his face so aggressively with black pencil that the page was nearly torn through.
But where Ethan had rubbed away one patch, an eye remained.
Gray-green.
Heavy upper lid.
A thin pale scar cutting through the outer eyebrow.
Ethan knew that scar.
Marcus Vale.
His closest friend for almost twenty years.
His former business partner.
And a man who had been dead for six years.
Ethan’s voice changed.
“Lily, where did you see him?”
Lily lifted her head.
“Claire showed me.”
“A photograph?”
Lily nodded.
Claire immediately said, “She doesn’t understand what she saw.”
Ethan turned.
“You told my five-year-old that Marcus was her real father.”
Claire’s face tightened.
“I told her what her mother was too afraid to tell you.”
That hurt because Lily’s mother, Anna Bennett, had died two years earlier.
Ethan had spent those two years trying to keep Lily’s world stable.
Claire—Anna’s younger sister—had become part of that stability.
Birthday dinners.
School pickups.
Weekends at the mansion when Ethan traveled.
Now Lily was trembling in his arms because Claire had struck her.
And Claire was using a dead man to tear apart the only certainty the child had left.
Ethan picked up his phone.
Claire’s panic sharpened.
“Who are you calling?”
“Someone who can keep you away from Lily.”
Claire laughed once.
Not because anything was funny.
“Call whoever you want. The paperwork still exists.”
“What paperwork?”
She looked toward Ethan’s discarded briefcase.
“The sealed paternity file Anna left behind.”
Ethan went still.
There had never been a paternity file.
At least none he knew of.
Claire noticed his expression.
“That’s why I told Lily.”
“You told a five-year-old before you told me?”
“I needed to know what she remembered.”
Ethan’s anger changed shape.
“What she remembered about what?”
Claire’s mouth opened.
Then stopped.
Lily whispered into Ethan’s shoulder:
“She asked me if Mommy ever called Daddy by another name.”
Ethan looked down.
“What name?”
Lily hesitated.
Then said:
“Marcus.”
For one second, the old friendship became unbearable.
Marcus Vale had died eleven months before Lily was born.
Which should have made Claire’s claim impossible.
Except Ethan remembered something he had spent six years deliberately forgetting.
Three weeks before Marcus died, Anna had met him alone.
May you like
At a hotel.
And she had lied to Ethan about why.
